In connection with the ever increasing popularity of electronic devices and communications, individual users are increasingly using a wider and wider range of devices having very different capabilities. For example, it is not unusual for a single individual to regularly use a cell phone, a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), a laptop computer, a desktop computer, one or more set-top boxes etc.
Furthermore, the devices tend to be using an increasing variety of more and more complex applications. Such applications tend to provide customization to the individual users characteristics and preferences and therefore require personal information which is typically provided in the form of data stored in a user profile. Different applications and devices tend to require different levels of personal information about the user. However, current applications are generally unable to efficiently exchange user information with each other. Typically, a user needs to manually log on to different applications and to provide user profile information for each application. In addition, information obtained or generated by one application can generally not be used by other applications and updates to the user profile information cannot be easily distributed.
In order to address such disadvantages, it has been proposed to store user profiles separately from the applications that are using them. Specifically, it has been proposed to store a user profile centrally and to allow multiple applications and devices to access the centrally stored user profile when specific user profile information may be needed. Whereas this may allow a coherent and simplified experience for the individual user, it has a number of disadvantages including an increased complexity and resource requirement as the individual devices must access the central server whenever user profile information is needed. It furthermore requires that a central storage with all the user profile information is provided and continuously maintained and it may lead to a high sensitivity to errors or faults in the central storage server.
It has also been proposed to store the user profile on each device. However, this requires additional memory in each device in order to store the full user profile in each location. At the same time, different devices have different capabilities and requirements and therefore the optimal user profile for each device may vary substantially.
Hence, an improved system for user profile distribution would be advantageous and in particular a system allowing increased flexibility, increased adaptation to individual devices, reduced communication requirements, reduced storage requirements and/or improved performance would be advantageous.